"We couldn't let them have that election because they were going to
elect that dictator." -- President Eisenhower speaking of the nationwide
election promised Vietnam by the world powers after Vietnamese guerrillas under
Ho Chi Minh ousted the French. China was amongst the ones, along with the U.S.,
who saw to it that Vietnam did not become united under Ho Chi Minh.

During the Cold War, if the West (the U.S. and Europe) thought that
a third-world country was headed towards falling under Communist
control, the West often intervened and established a reliably
anti-Communist dictatorship. And where a right wing dictatorship already
existed, Western policy was to support that dictatorship rather than
press for democratic reform, because democracies were vulnerable to
Soviet takeover, but dictatorships could be controlled. In every case
there was a reasonable option to support democracy as the best
counter to Communism, to fight fire with water, instead of fighting fire
with fire, but these options were almost never chosen..... In the
long run the West wanted democracy for the third world, but, as policy makers saw it, leftist
leaders like Allende in Chile and
Lumumba in the liberated Belgian Congo, were on a path to Communist
dictatorship and had to be stopped. People in these third-world countries, as well as people in the rich nations, disagree
about whether these interventions were justified. When some people from
the third world say the U.S. wants democracy for itself but not for poor nations,
and that the U.S. goes around the world causing wars, they are usually
talking about Cold War military regimes imposed on them by the U.S., and
the resulting wars of rebellion against those regimes. Others from Third
World countries, many working class people as well as rich, speak with gratitude
for U.S. interventions, which, as they see it, saved them from becoming
another Cuba or North Korea.............What we would like to do on this
page is develop a file of arguments for and against U.S. Cold War policy,
case by case in terms of the different third world countries, and in
general terms. We would like to promote high school debates on this
issue in which students choose which side to argue. We would like to get
beyond the left calling the right fascists and the right saying that the
left was rooting for Communism. There is an argument that planting
dictatorships as a defense against Communism was the right thing to do,
and it is not a pro-fascist argument. There is an argument that
supporting leftist democracies like Chile under Allende,
or Iran under Mossadegh would have been a better, and more humane way to
fight Communism, and this is not a pro-Communist argument.
........Another question we in the U.S. should debate is this: given a
policy of supporting reliably anti-communist dictatorships, should the
U.S. have tried to stop the horrors perpetrated by governments like
Guatemala and Iran (under the Shaw) in the name of anti-Communism? Did
the U.S. encourage extermination of labor activists, student organizers
and other leftists? Did the U.S. support state terror, or did the U.S.
try to curb such excesses? Is it not true that the persecution of
civilians by the governments the U.S. supported was a major force in
driving people to join the anti-government war efforts supported by the
Soviets? Some issues: At the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh
petitioned U.S. president Harry Truman to help Vietnam
become a democracy, but Truman ignored Ho and supported
the French recolonization, leading to the French Vietnam war, which the
French lost. The U.S. intervention followed. Did president Truman make a
mistake?... Few Americans know that president Truman crushed the
political left in Japan 1949, because the left was getting too powerful
and posed a threat to take office and become a Soviet ally. This is why
Japan is a one party state, not a democracy, to this day, is it not?
(Japan is a democracy in most ways -- it has freedom of speech, a poor
person has rights in court, the police are not criminals on a routine
basis -- but politically it has been essentially a one party state since
1949. By contrast Mexico now has multi-party elections but people lack
all the rights of a democracy. Japan is much more of a democracy than
Mexico, but politically it has been a one party state since Truman's
1949 "reverse course" action.

Emerging Cold War issue in U.S. press (unless the
press decides to stop talking about it).

U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam used to say, back in the 1970's, that they
often shot at anything
that moved when they went into villages. Thanks to a series of articles by the
Toledo Blade the New York Times has written an article on likelihood that
killing of civilians by U.S. troops was much more common than has been
acknowledged. For the New
York Times article on killing of civilians by U.S. forces in Vietnam,click here

In Bolivia, in 1953, the U.S. worked with President Estenssoro's leftist
government, which was threatening to nationalize mining interests of
U.S. business. Rather than engineer a coup as it did in Guatemala and
Iran, the U.S. figured that in Bolivia, which was smaller, weaker, and
dependant on the U.S. for aid and exports, it would tolerate a leftist
government because it could be controlled. Following Eisenhower's
election in 1952, this is the only example I know of where a U.S.
administration decided to support rather than cut down a leftist
government where the threat of communist takeover was considered
substantial. For an article on the 1953 Bolivia - Eisenhower maneuvers,
click here. For an article
comparing the U.S. treatment of Bolivia with the U.S. treatment of
Guatemala in 1953-54, click
here.

Both sides have an
argument.

The cartoon on the left is from an editorial by Andrew
Sullivan (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4, 2001) in which he claims that
leftists cannot give their allegiance to the likes of Osama Bin Laden the
way they rallied to the cause of communists in the Cold War, because Bin
Laden and his Islamic militant cohorts -- Al Qaida -- are just too ghastly
and crazy for leftists to support, even though they would like to. The
"agony of the left" is how he describes this predicament of leftists. What
Mr. Sullivan is missing, probably not deliberately, is that people who
opposed the Vietnam War and other Cold War policies of the West did not
praise or believe in communism or dictators like Castro or Mao Tse Tung.
There were some who did. But most
leftists were pro-democracy not pro-Communism. (As John Lennon put it in the
song "Revolution", "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain't
gonna make it with anyone anyhow.") And what they were against was U.S.
support for right wing regimes that were just as bad as the Communist
regimes. (One has to admire the art, even if it's telling a lie.)

It is likewise
unfair for leftists to say that all the U.S. wanted in the Cold War was to
advance business interests. Clearly there were cases where business was
protected, e.g. Guatemala and Iran, and it is possible that the Cold War was
fostered by the "military industrial complex" in a conspiracy to have wars
all over the world. But the thinking of presidents and policymakers, from
Truman to Reagan, was that they had to stop the advance of communism.
Western policy was motivated by a legitimate fear that Stalin was trying trying to take over the
world. It is true that free enterprise was at stake, but so was every other
human freedom. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- the Vietnam
War presidents -- were not thinking about businesses in particular or
even business in general. They were thinking about protecting "the free
world" as Kennedy called it, even if there was no freedom under the
governments we supported. This was not seen as hypocrisy but the smart way
to fight communism. The fact that the U.S. was turning
democracies into dictatorships (reliably anti-Communist dictatorships) does
not change the fact that U.S. leaders felt they were doing what
they had to do to stop Communist hegemony.

One good reason to study the Cold War is that the current clash of Muslim
nations with the West is very similar to Cold War hostilities. Like the
Communists of the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalists will establish a police
state if they rise to power through democratic process -- putting the West
in the position of claiming to want democracy but suppressing real elections
because of who will be elected. In Afghanistan and Iraq the U.S. wants
democracy after overthrowing regimes -- regimes the U.S. used to
support until they got out of line. The U.S. is on the spot in these
two places and has to make good on its claims of being be pro-democracy.
No where else is there any apparent push for democracy in the Middle East.
And look aroung the world, it's the same story. The U.S.embargoes Cuba but
China gets "most favored nation" status.

As with the Cold War, U.S. allies in the Muslim world are
outright dictatorships, like Saudi Arabia, or phony democracies like Egypt
and Turkey. (Until recently didi not let Kurds name their children with
Kurdish names. The Kurdish language was not allowed in schools.) Iran is an interesting case -- it was turned into a Western-
supported dictatorship under a 1953 Cold War coup that got rid of a
democracy, and then, in 1979 Islamists threw out the Cold War tyrant (the
Shaw) and established an Islamic state. So Iran has been put through both
East-West ringers, Cold War and anti-Western Islamic Jihad. Then there was
the Iran Iraq war, promoted by the U.S., some say, but all agree the U.S.
had no complaints that saddam Hussein was attacking Iran. Indonesia is
another case where Cold War horrors, visited upon the people by a
U.S.-supported henchman, Suharto, is cause for prevailing contempt for the
U.S. and
distrust of the U.S. by the Muslim population.

Critics of Western Cold War policy should bear in mind that, if it were
certain that a democracy was going to fall to Soviet control, then it was not
unreasonable to establish "one of our" dictatorships before the Soviets
established one of theirs. It is a fact that the Soviet agents were swarming the
planet with all manner of propaganda, manipulation, etc., and that their police
states, once established, were very hard to overturn. Stalin was a great
exterminator of people, like Hitler -- and wanted to control the world. I am not
asking critics to condone the types of murderous government the West supported.
I am saying that if the reader was in a situation where the choice was between a
U.S. controlled dictatorship or a Soviet controlled dictatorship, the reader
would choose U.S. control. What U.S. policy makers say, in retrospect, is: we
felt we had no choice. What I try to point out here is that there was a choice,
support democracy, and run the risk the Soviets would get it, because the risk
was not as high as our policy makers thought. Supporting
dictatorships was not the only option. I personally think supporting democracy,
in every case -- Iran, Guatemala, Congo etc. -- would have been a more effective
way to fight the spread of Soviet satellite states. If some countries had
become "another Cuba" so be it. The shining examples of democracy -- freedom of
speech, free enterprise, etc. -- which we supported would have been beacons for
the world, and an incentive for small nations to fight for freedom. As it was
"our dictatorships" may have been, in most ways "better than their
dictatorships," as one U.S. ambassodor to the U.N., Jean Kirkpatrick, put it,
but they were still ugly, murderous, vile dictatorships like Zaire under Mobutu
or whatever one you choose. All hideous places with no freedom except for the
rich. But I do not think there is
no argument on the other side. It may be naive to think, especially in the
shadow of the colonial experience, that people anywhere would choose their
colonizers, the the U.S. and Europe, offering them democracy where they had
offered them a type of slavery before, over the Soviet's message of workers
unite and take charge of your destiny, even if it was a lie. I think we should be having this argument in our
high schools. It may be noted that the U.S did not really have colonies the way
the Europeans did. But the U.S. controlled Latin America, especially Central
America, as if these countries were colonies, pursuant to the Monroe Doctrine
(a.k.a the John Quincy Adams doctrine) which was not a political exclusion of
Europe, it was just defining turf for U.S. business interests. This is our
cookie jar, not Europe's, said the Monroe Doctrine, although Europe was not so
easily deterred.

Those who support the policy of imposing dictatorships should see that if a democracy, such as Guatemala or
Iran, would have survived as a democracy, then it would have been
better to simply support the democracy, for many reasons. These
reasons include the following. -- (1) Democracy would have been
an offense, rather than just a defense against Communism, inspiring people in Communist
states to rebel because they could see the advantage of living in
a democracy. As it was people around the world knew that the
alternative to a Communist police state was a Western-allied
police state, replete with military exterminations, no freedom of speech etc.
(2) By supporting dictatorships the West fit the mold of Soviet propaganda. The
world could look at places like Zaire, South Vietnam etc. and see that the rich
and the military ruled and citizens had no real rights, just like the Communists
said about capitalists. (3) Dictatorships supported by the West were given free
rein to murder and this caused wars of rebellion, essentially recruiting for the
Communist cause. In a democracy there would not have been such popular
rebellions because people would not have hated their governments. The Soviets
might have overthrown a democracy by political subterfuge, but the political
force of the people would not have supported them. In other words the murderous
ways of all our proxies, e.g. Salvador, Guatemala, Cambodia (under Lon Nol),
South Vietnam, Zaire, Iran served as a recruitment tool for the Soviets. (4) We ask
supporters of Cold War policy to acknowledge that in each case
there existed a democratic option and that these options were not
unreasonable or hopeless causes. Examples include accepting Ho
Chi Mihn's plea to the U.S. to occupy and help the country at the end of World War II.
Harry Truman said "the buck stops here," maybe so, I don't know that much about
his domestic policy, but the frank and pound and the gilder and the ruble
certainly did not. He let the colonies be reinstated. Ho Chi Minh was at the
peace of Paris, after World War I, and was told to take a hike. So much for
democracy. And the same after World War II.

What we need to get past is the notion that the U.S. and Europe supported
democracy during the course of the Cold War. There exist a few exceptions, such
as support for leftist democratic regimes in Bolivia and Colombia that spanned several
years. But these were exceptions, and rare ones.

For Americans, smug in the ignorant belief that the U.S.
supported democracy in the Cold War, to look at the Third World
and say, "They're still not ready for democracy, after all
our effort," is an ugly spectacle for the world to see. Many
people around the world think the U.S. did the right thing in
propping up dictatorships like Salvador and getting rid of risky
democracies like the Mossadeh admonistration in Iran, but Americans are alone in
harboring a widespread belief that the U.S. supported democracy in the
Cold War. Europeans know better because they learn history better in high
school. It is time for U.S. schools to teach Cold War history in some depth,
with arguments pro and con U.S. policy. It is because history in U.S. schools is
so superficial that the government is able to get away with leaving students
with the impression that the West supported democracy during the years of the
Cold War. In fact there is some fairly straight talk about what the U.S.
did in some high school books, but it is scattered accounts that are usually
presented as something the U.S. had no choice in. The U.S. had a choice, in
every case, both to support democracy instead of dictatorship, and to try to
curb human rights abuses by sponsored dictatorships. There is no question that
the U.S. almost always chose dictatorship over democracy. What is arguable is
the question of whether the U.S. routinely turned a blind eye to the
extermination of civilians in the name of anti-communism by U.S. supported
dictatorships.

Some claim that the U.S. and Europe, having established a reliably
anti-communist government, supported human rights and tried
to stop government killing of civilians who opposed the government. But there is
a mountain of local testimony about Cold War atrocities, rarely reported
in the U.S. press at the time, stating that Western Cold War allies slaughtered civilians.
Europe reported these horrors more than the U.S. In Vietnam some U.S. vets
say they went into villages and shot anything that moved. (See the video "Winter
Soldier, Vietnam.") In El Salvador it is
claimed the U.S. supported army took students out of the city and killed them,
their crime being not being in the army and not being rich. Guatemala,
Argentina, Chile, Zaire, Iran and many other U.S. Cold War allies were terror
states, killing people just to show that dissent was not tolerated, the same as
in
Communist countries. The question we would like to debate here is, did the U.S.
and Europe, having helped create these dictatorships, make an effort to stop the
mayhem that ensued, or did Western governments let it happen?

This is important to discuss, with the understanding that the West may
have supported brutality in some cases but actually tried to stop it in others. It is important to discuss because just as democracy might have been a better way to fight Communism
than the "reliably ant-Communist" dictatorship method the West chose, so might a
benign dictatorship have been a better way to fight Communism than a murderous,
corrupt one. Perhaps the U.S. could not control the governments it supported,
but in many cases it seems the U.S. essentially ran governments by remote
control, with a very loose leash where murder of civilians was concerned.

It is possible the U.S. and Europe, having established a dictatorship that
was reliably anti-Communist, could have avoided wars of rebellion by demanding
decent treatment of citizens. A benign dictatorship, without a civil war to
fight because people were not reacting against torture and mayhem, could have supported a healthy economy. U.S. aid that bought weapons to
fight wars could have been used to pay for health, education and agriculture.

While it is valuable to debate options that were available, we should know
the truth about what happened, case by case, including sideshows like Suriname,
whose government President Kennedy destroyed because its president said
something positive about Fidel Castro. According to reports the Kennedy
administration orchestrated riots, arranged murders, created phony press reports
about Cuban forces poised to invade etc. If this is true, that Kennedy chose thus
to defend the "free world" against Communism, then Americans should know this truth
and it should be taught in our schools.

It is also important to come to terms with horrific events like Nixon's
massive bombing of Hanoi, which followed the breakdown of a peace negotiations
between North and South Vietnam. It was the South, the U.S. ally, which rejected
the agreement, yet the U.S. reacted by bombing the North. Some claim that Nixon
did not want to appear adrift after the peace talks failed, so he bombed
Hanoi to improve his image. Other issues include Napalm
undergoing successive reformulations so it would stick to people and and burn
them more efficiently.

A good reason to study the Cold War is that people of the Third World are still living in the
political nightmare created in the Cold War. It is important for
the world to face the realities of the Cold War history so that
we can all help shape a more democratic, prosperous future for
those who have suffered at the hands the "civilized" world from colonial
times through the Cold War.